Adventures in the east of Korea and the Lantern Festival

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This past weekend my friend mentioned he was going on a trip to the eastern part of Korea. Every Autumn and Spring he and his guitar club go somewhere to the east to play classical guitar for a school or some place where their arts program isn't as well developed as it might be in Seoul. He said he was leaving at 5:30 in the morning. I said good luck. I planned to never get up that early for a long time after I left Starbucks and deleted my 3:30 call time that was saved into my phone. Then he decided to ask if I wanted to go with him. It would be a good chance for me to see somewhere outside of Seoul and since we aren't able to hang out that often...we had some time to hang out during the weekend. Against my brain protesting to stay home and sleep, I agreed. I quickly packed and tried to sleep. That didn't work out so well, but I was able to sleep for a little while during the four hour car ride on the way there.

We get there and people playing in the show practice for about an hour, and then the children all file in to the middle school auditorium. They played around 11 songs and even asked for an encore. It was pretty neat to watch. The school admin then took us to lunch and we had some fish that was famous in the area.

Dropping our stuff off at the hotel we then continued on to go sightseeing. We were taken to this coal mine that had been shut down in 2004 and we were able to ride into one of the tunnels (not down though) and see a short video and experience being in a tunnel. It was pretty cool. So very dark and wet inside though.

After that we headed to a temple (Buddhist) and looked around there for a bit. When we were finished there it was about time for dinner so we headed to the restaurant. We had pork that was like a really thick bacon almost and it is very good. Since I was a guest in Korea, the person who was buying the meal wanted me to try some really good quality Korean beef. It was AMAZING. Almost melted in your mouth it was that good.

For the rest of the evening, we all just hung out and talked (well they talked 😊 ) and ate snacks we'd picked up earlier. Close to midnight I'd been up for about a day and a half, so I was exhausted. We had to rooms (2 bedrooms in each...but only one had a bed in them) The guy s apparently didn't want the bed, so my friend asked if they wouldn't mind since it was separate anyway (door closed) if I would be able to sleep there since the bed in the other room was taken by a mother and daughter. They said sure. It was awesome. I never realized how much I missed having a bed until I slept on the floor for two months.

The next morning my friend and I left early because he had to work and we hit traffic on the way back so it was good we left when we did. I was sad to leave the bed (hehe), but it was a good weekend. I saw a different area in Korea, and I met some really nice new people.

I had no plans that Sunday night after returning from the trip, so I decided to go to the lantern festival that was going on about a 20 minute walk from where I am staying. There were so many people though, it took about an hour just to get to the lanterns from the line. The lanterns were all set in this artificial stream in the center of Seoul and it was really neat to go through and see all of them. Some of them were a bit questionable (you'll see in the pictures), but others were so beautiful. Some told about history, and others were more modern. They even had a big lantern that resembled the gate and part of the wall of one of the palaces. Now THAT was impressive. It took me a few hours to go through it, but I was glad I did.

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